A Multimodal Workshop to Improve Medical Student Self-Assessment of Knowledge and Comfort Managing Patients With...

Suicide is a preventable public health concern, yet suicide remains a leading cause of death for Americans. Physicians are well positioned to screen for and address suicidality. It is important to provide formal suicide education during medical school so that physicians are better prepared to address this topic with their patients. The goal of this workshop was to improve medical student self-assessment of knowledge and comfort managing patients with suicidality.

This was a 2.5-hour multimodal workshop developed for formal third-year medical student suicide education that included: flipped learning with a preworkshop presentation; experiential learning, scaffolding, reflection, and feedback with two standardized patient encounters; think-pair-share with small- and large-group discussion; and a facilitator-led large-group didactic.

Of the 105 third-year medical students who completed the workshop in the first half of the 2023-2024 academic year, 84% (88/105) completed the presurvey and 70% (73/105) completed the postsurvey. Prior to the workshop, on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = not at all, 5 = extremely), respondents rated their knowledge regarding suicide assessment as 2.2 and their comfort managing suicidality as 2.6. This improved to 4.0 and 3.9, respectively, on the postworkshop survey. Students felt the workshop was helpful and relevant.

Future work should involve identifying if this reported self-improvement transfers to clinical skill advancement and, if so, measuring the clinical impact of this innovation for patients. Furthermore, assessing if this self-reported improvement in knowledge and comfort managing suicidality is long-lasting should be explored.